Jacob Covey
and I sat down to chew the fat about his latest project, Beasts 2. We discuss some other aspects of his work at Fantagraphics and his awkward unruly love of the TMNT. If you are in San Francisco, make sure to check out the Beasts art show at Giant Robot.
Re: lowbrow art: lowbrow = low-class, and all the comics Robin reviews are solidly bougie (i.e., bourgeois). Light entertainment would be a better term. When I think of lowbrow comics I think of knuckle-headed publications like Hustler Humor and From Sex To Sexty.
This whole issue reminds me of a scene in a French movie called “Romance X” where the main character’s boyfriend is shown in a clean, well-lit, half-full coffee shop at 3am sitting by himself at a small table fastidiously reading Bukowski. Geddit? There’s some hot XXX sex in this movie, by the way, including a very nicely surprising money-shot at one point. Written and directed by a woman, I believe.
I’ve been a culture vulture all my life and it’s something I deeply regret.
more ‘lowbrow’: Crumb, back in the day, satirized the hippies’ studied attempts to re-claim their right to live as innocent, sensual creatures with his: “Biceps Bunny sez: Be Animalistic!”
The bottom line is that comics, like all arts and culture, is second-hand life. If you’re reading about it, you’re not doing it. You’re trapped in your isolated, neurotically-repressed shell. It’s effectively “escapism for the damned”, to quote my wise old friend Cum-f*ck-see-us.
Nothing captures this for me more than a recent photo I saw on-line of James Kochalka rockin’ out in a squeaky-clean bookstore in white-bread Burlington, VT, a town I’ve spent a fair amount of time in during my life.
Once you’ve been brought up middle-class there’s really no hope for ever living a decent life.